China. Ten Years Behind? (2023 Update)

The ASML photo-lithgraphy machine has been around since I was living in the Netherlands - I tried to get work there early on. By now somebody should have an ever fancier system under development. There have always been other ways of skinning that particular cat that didn't lend themselves quite to well to high volume production.

I don't think we can rely on it to keep us "decades ahead of China", even if Phil Hobbs did work out how to keep track of the droplets of molten tin that get hit by high powered lasers to generate the EUV.

That scanner is the older model; we have some gear in it. The new one costs twice as much.

But I wouldn't think it's the most complicated machine that humans have built. Most precise maybe.

No, Taiwan is part of China, as they claim. So, China is most advanced. They will prove it by force.

So if Taiwan is part of China I guess the Chinese government is getting rich off of the tax revenue the world pays to have their chips made there.

It's pretty amazing to realize the most advanced CPU company in the world was eclipsed by a job shop semiconductor fab house. I believe they sell none of their own products. They just make chips for companies who realize they do it better than can be done by any one company, no matter what their size. Intel was beaten at their own game by a largely fabless semiconductor house.

Mao manged to kill something between 15 and 55 million Chinese by starvation. A mini-Mao would then have to starved between 15,000 and 55,000 Chinese to qualify.

You'd have trouble qualifying him as a micro-Mao - China hasn't had any famines since he came to power.

Xi may have his defects, but he's not a Stalin, a Mao or even a Pol Pot (who managed to kill off between 1.5 and 2 million people - roughly a quarter of the population under his control). Do try to get a better understanding of what's going on in China - Xi is a threat precisely because he has better grasp of reality than Mao. He almost certainly got a better grasp of reality than you do. It would take a ding-bat like Trump to rival Mao.

Well, yeah, but... a hybrid seed doesn't help you to grow the PARENT plants, you'd need to gather those parent seeds from a field that's not growing the crop, but the parents. Heck, a productive hybrid crop might not make any viable seeds.

It's like the old trick of selling silkworms... but only the males. You can't make much silk if you can't propogate the species.

So, I'm guessing they're stealing patented/secret production precursors rather than any seed which could be got wholesale. China doesn't recognize patents, nor, if they can get away with it, a lot of theft-of-property. That's Communism's ecological niche.

Seems a lot more in character with a US operation, like the attempts to kill Venezuelan leaders and support a coup.

The people living around me here ion Taiwan would disagree.

Disagreement is Illegal. Resistance is Futile.